HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ANS LIBRARY

David Hill, Eric Krauss, Matthew Ruttley, and Peter Sugar.

The Library figured prominently into a couple of the Saturday lunch talks that the ANS has been hosting lately. One topic was digitization, and it was a great opportunity to talk about our collaboration with the Newman Numismatic Portal and Internet Archive and also to look back at the Society’s early use of computers to manage its curatorial and library collections, efforts conceived and funded by the ANS’s great benefactor and president, Harry Bass, beginning in the 1980s.

On another Saturday the subject was numismatic book collecting, and for that one I was joined by bibliophile and collector Jonathan Kagan who brought in some of his own treasures to talk about. For our presentation, we looked at these and some of the standout items from the ANS Library (many of which were donated by the Harry Bass Foundation).

In the United States, one of the earliest general numismatic books published was A Manual of Gold and Silver Coins of All Nations (1842) by Jacob Eckfeldt and William Du Bois, assayers at the U.S. Mint. Among other things, the book is remembered as being the first to illustrate the 1804 dollar.

In 1850 the authors published a supplement, much of which dealt with practical matters arising from the recent California Gold Rush, such as varying degrees of that metal’s fineness and fees for coining gold at the mint. In one section, the authors wanted to show what the gold looked like before and after iron is removed by the mint, as they were concerned that the lightening of the hue might lead some to suspect the fraudulent addition of silver. Like so many others publishing in the years before it was possible to reproduce color photographs, the authors had to get creative to illustrate this. To make their point, they included actual gold samples in each publication.

(Another innovative approach to illustration dating from the same period can be seen [here], where the author included three-dimensional facsimiles of coins in his book.)

Another numismatic rarity is S. H. (Samuel Hudson) Chapman’s The United States Cents of the Year 1794 (1923). According to ANS member and Large Cent collector Jim Neiswinter, there are only about 10 or so copies of the original 1923 version known today.

Chapman published 100 of them, but they were so em- barrassingly rife with errors, he was moved to clean the book up and republish it in 1926, recalling the old ones and offering new ones as replacements. The ANS has two copies of the 1923 version, and one of them is particularly special as it belonged to Large Cent collector and scholar George Clapp (1858–1949), who had filled it with his own acerbic annotations, which Neiswinter amusingly discusses in his book About Cents II (2017).

In the margins of his copy of the Chapman book, Clapp jotted comments on the numerous factual errors he found. When Chapman boasts that he didn’t feel the need to consult a work by his old nemesis, Edward Frossard, Clapp dryly notes, “Too bad, for had he used Frossard’s text he could have avoided some of the errors of which this book is full.” It wasn’t just the factual errors that got to Clapp. He was appalled by Chapman’s spelling and grammar, too. As Neiswinter puts it, “George Clapp went through this monograph like an English professor who did not like the student who wrote it.” Having slogged through one passage of Chapman’s tangled syntax, Clapp wrote next to it: “This is a splendid [way] of how not to write English.”

Another beautifully bound set is the Corpus of Russian Coins that once belonged to the Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich (1847–1909) and was given to the Library by Catherine Bullowa Moore. It was published by the duke’s nephew Georgii Mikhailovich (1863–1919), himself a grand duke. Georgii’s historical reputation suffers by comparison to his five brothers, who exceled in military and scholarly pursuits, and he is remembered for living a life of indolence and leisure, devoting his time to bridge playing and other interests, such as coin and medal collecting, which he indulged by buying up existing Russian collections and building a museum in which to display them.

In the 1880s, he turned his attention to numismatic scholarship, assembling a team to conduct archival research and publishing it as the Corpus, though such was his reputation that the degree of his direct involvement in these efforts, beyond organizing and spearheading the project, is still a matter of debate.

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http://numismatics.org/magazine/

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http://numismatics.org/

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